A few brief days in embryonic life lays out our body's construction plan. The appearance of limbs and vertebrae is orchestrated by a family of 'architect' genes called Hox, each providing precise instructions at a given time.

New research has demonstrated that these genes were aligned within our chromosomes according to the order of structures - collinear expression in developing limb buds: first the components of the shoulder, then the arm, and finally the fingers.

Using social media like Twitter, Facebook and others is said to be like drinking from a fire hose.

A team of data scientists at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, is trying to drink from 7 billion firehoses.  They have created a system capable of analyzing billions of tweets and other social media messages in an effort to discover patterns and make sense of all the information. They call the analysis tool "SALSA" (SociAL Sensor Analytics).

"The world is equipped with human sensors – more than 7 billion and counting. It's by far the most extensive sensor network on the planet. What can we learn by paying attention?"  Court Corley, data scientist at PNNL, said.

Combat troops must minimize the 'human-ness' of their enemies in order to kill them, they can't be effective fighters if they're distracted by feelings of empathy for opponents.

But if the opponent is dehumanized, which entails seeing them as disgusting animals, the possibility for war crimes is greater, note psychologists writing in NeuroImage. Indifference to the enemy, rather than loathing, may help prevent war crimes and provide troops with a better path back to healthy civilian lives, they propose.

Their hypothesis is based on new work showing how the brain operates when people objectify—that is, think of others as mere objects — or dehumanize, which entails seeing others as disgusting animals.

Spindle-shaped inclusions in 3 billion-year-old rocks are microfossils of plankton probably inhabited the oceans around the globe during that time - but these inclusions in the rocks were not only biological in origin, they were also likely planktonic autotrophs - free-floating, tiny ocean organisms that produce energy from their environment. 

In animals that reproduce by internal fertilization, as humans do, the penis is invaluable, from an evolutionary point of view. 

Yet birds have evolved to not need them. Developmentally speaking, birds' penises have gone. Land fowl, which have only rudimentary penises as adults, have normally developing penises as early embryos. Later in development, however, the birds turn on a genetic program that leads their budding penises to stop growing and then wither away.

In one sense, I am happy that there is enough interest in the concept of “junk DNA” (and by extension, my area of research in genome size evolution) that the subject gets regular media attention.